Operators and international carriers face an ever-increasing set of options for routing and terminating their traffic. It is essential that they manage these options efficiently, in order to optimize the financial benefits and avoid losing vital margin. The market has traditionally offered a number of specialist LCR system providers, but these highly complex systems require a significant technical and commercial commitment, and for many service providers the ROI may not make complete sense

Operators and international carriers face an ever-increasing set of options for routing and terminating their traffic. It is essential that they manage these options efficiently, in order to optimize the financial benefits and avoid losing vital margin. The market has traditionally offered a number of specialist LCR system providers, but these highly complex systems require a significant technical and commercial commitment, and for many service providers the ROI may not make complete

The market has traditionally offered a number of specialist LCR system providers, but these highly complex systems require a significant technical and commercial commitment, and for many service providers the ROI may not make complete sense.

iCONX approaches the issue by applying the right methodology to each situation. For some customers, automated provisioning onto the network is appropriate, and the Least Cost Routing is interfaced directly onto the switch(es). For other customers, manual provisioning makes more sense, and here iCONX provides all of the functional benefits of LCR in an easy-to-access package.

Carrier Management Module

Through its Carrier Management Module, iCONX provides an effective and powerful set of LCR, Switch & Rates analysis reports. In this article we will take a quick look at three of the most important.

“Historic Routing” report

This report looks at past traffic, and asks the question : “what should we have done?” Here, the iCONX system runs actual data to generate a report of traffic by destination, as it was routed, and highlights the LCR savings if traffic had been routed optimally. You can drill down into a particular destination to compare particular carriers, obtaining all the various options for routing and the total save/cost figures.

The Historic Routing report offers an excellent opportunity to review and form an opinion on current routing, before taking the plunge with real traffic.

“LCR Predictive” report

This report takes historic data and applies it to the future, to ask the question : “how can we do it better?”. The system allows you to set required criteria – such as the date of the rates we wish to use, or the date of the actual sample of traffic we wish to use – and the system then looks at all the possible routes for that sample of traffic.

iCONX then looks at all the possible routes for the sample traffic, and produces a report containing recommendations for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd choice routings.

“Overall Rates” report

Of course as an iCONX customer you benefit from our powerful “Reporting Services” module. As well as letting you create from scratch your own bespoke reports, you can take standard LCR reports and run them through its enhanced functionality meaning easier exports to Excel, pdf etc.

One of the most interesting reports is the “Overall Rates” report. This gives you at-a-glance LCR recommendations by showing best possible routes classified as gold, silver and bronze choices. It’s a nice example of how intelligent data display formatting can help the user select the right choices intuitively.

LCR reports

These represent a sample selection of the routing analysis and rate reports available as standard in iCONX v7. Other reports include Switch and Route, National Grid, Call Cleardown Cause and Carrier Traffix and Rates.

As iCONX invests in its product roadmap to stay at the cutting edge, so we commit to adding value for customers big and small. In this way we can liberate the power of LCR functionality to benefit our entire customer base – as part of our standard v7 offer. For more information, please contact info@iconxsolutions.com.